Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Director Spotlight takes
a look at an auteur, shines some light on the director’s body of work, points
out what makes them an artist, and shows why some of their films work and some
don’t. This edition’s director is one of cinema’s finest directors of actors,
Elia Kazan.

NOTE: Look, I’m tired of typing it out for pretty much every
entry, so here it is in the opening: there’s going to be spoilers in this
thing, and in almost every entry of Director
Spotlight. There’s a lot more to a film than the basic plotting, which is
only a small part of the enjoyment as far as I’m concerned. Still, if it’s
going to bother you, I’d highly suggest not reading ahead until you’ve seen the
film in question.

The 1960s and 1970s saw most of the masters of Old Hollywood
failing to adjust to changing times. Frank Capra and Howard Hawks retired from
directing. Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder made an equal number of
interesting late-period works and embarrassing failures. There were certain
exceptions (John Huston being a notable example), but by and large, their time
had passed. Elia Kazan seemed like someone who might make a smoother transition
to the New Hollywood era than most of his peers, given his progressive nature
and influence over a generation of Method actors about to conquer the world.
Yet Kazan’s last three films show an important artist floundering trying to
adapt to modern filmmaking styles, like someone who might have something to say
but can’t quite find how to articulate it.

The Arrangement Grade:
7/D-

Kazan’s problems started with 1969’s The Arrangement. Following the release of America America, Kazan took a six-year break before adapting his
novel of the same name. It was a mistake. Where the novel found some favorable
reviews, the film version of The
Arrangement was wildly derided upon its release and helped effectively end
his directing career in Hollywood. The film is no doubt a personal statement,
but it’s also glib and wildly pretentious, mimicking new film styles without
understanding them.

Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas) is a successful advertising
man in the middle of an existential crisis. His relationship with his mistress
(Faye Dunaway) has broken down because he refuses to leave his wife (Deborah
Kerr), with whom he’s completely miserable. After a failed suicide attempt,
Eddie’s life starts to take a downward spiral while he goes through a period of
self-examination. He also restarts his relationship with his mistress while
visiting his dying father (Richard Boone).

There’s a lot of potent material to be mined here- satire of
the advertising age and consumerism,a
look at the breakdown of the family- but Kazan botches it badly. Most of the
material dealing with Eddie’s cigarette ad-man advertisements are slick and
shallow, and they can’t find anything interesting to say about selling out that
hasn’t been said in any number of media satires before it, Kazan’s own A Face in the Crowd included. Where the
earlier film was sharp and precise, The
Arrangement is blunt and leaden. What’s worse, the psychodrama material is
largely made up of overwrought shouting matches between Douglas, Kerr, and
other family members, with characters openly trying to work out their hang-ups
in a style that grows increasingly tedious. Kazan complained that he couldn’t
get Marlon Brando to agree to the lead role and that Douglas was miscast as the
introspective Eddie. Douglas is indeed overheated, but it’s doubtful that
anyone could make much from this material. Only Dunaway comes close to having a
genuine emotional moment.

The film’s form matches its risible content and tone. Where
Kazan’s past works had shown a masterful mix of noir-like expressionism and
American realism, The Arrangement shows
Kazan throwing in European and New Hollywood flourishes without much skill for
them. The film gets off to a bad start with an early morning routine showcasing
the distance and banality of Douglas and Kerr’s married life- they’re far apart
at all times, but they do the same thing. It comes off as a pretentious sub-Antonioni
affectation more than a profound statement on married life. A number of the
early scenes intercutting Douglas’ troubled married life with moments of him
fooling around with Dunaway on the beach play like attempts to capture Federico
Fellini or Jean-Luc Godard at their most playful (not to mention John Boorman’s
unconventional editing techniques on Point
Blank), but after half an hour of this it starts to reek of desperation. It’s
admirable that Kazan tried new things when New Hollywood started, but his first
attempt ended up being his very worst film.

The Visitors Grade:
32/C-

The Arrangement flopped
so badly that Kazan had to self-finance his next film, the equally personal The Visitors. Again, it’s admirable that
Kazan wanted to try something new, and in theory, this $160,000 thriller could
have been a bold step in a new direction for the filmmaker. It was not to be. The Visitors wasn’t as embarrassing as The Arrangement- Kazan toned down his
European art cinema pretensions- but it still stands out as a particularly weak
entry into his filmography.

Bill Schmidt (an alarmingly young James Woods) is a Vietnam
War veteran living with his longtime girlfriend Martha (Patricia Joyce), their
infant son Hal, and Martha’s reactionary father Harry (Patrick McVey). When two
of Bill’s army buddies (Steve Railsback and Chico Martinez) show up without
notice in the winter, Bill reacts strangely but doesn’t tip off Martha what’s
wrong. It turns out that these are two of the soldiers Bill had court-martialed
for murder and rape. The soldiers bond with Harry as they start to intimidate
Bill and Martha.

To Kazan’s credit, he starts the film off well with a stark,
minimalistic feeling that’s aided by the 16mm film stock. Kazan also stages his
actors well to capture a quiet, low-key menace that promises a slow build to
something disturbing and unexpected. Woods is particularly strong in these
early scenes as a man trying hard not to reveal his own fear of his old
friends, lest he cause a panic.

The problem starts after the reveal of exactly what’s going
on with these old friends and why Woods should be afraid- his low-key reaction
is made unbelievable considering the ill will these men have towards him. As
the film goes on, it becomes even less believable that Woods and Joyce wouldn’t
try to kick out the soldiers or call the cops. More problematic: Kazan chooses
to bait the audience with casual nudity, didactic speeches about masculinity,
war, and politics, and one of the weirdest Chekhov’s guns I’ve ever seen
in a movie. Rewrite of the rule: if a dog shows up and annoys a character twice
in the first act, it’ll get shot and dumped on the porch by the start of the
second (no, really).

What’s too bad is that Kazan had a chance to do something
great here. The film is inspired by the story “Casualties of War”, the same one
that would be brilliantly adapted by Brian De Palma in 1989. The idea of taking
these characters and placing them in a post-war environment is a good one, but
Chris Kazan’s didactic script and Kazan’s audience-baiting plays less like a
bold artistic experiment from a visionary dramatist and more like Straw Dogs as reimagined by a wannabe
John Cassavetes who thinks he’s got something new to say about war and the men
who fight it. In short, this film is not very good.

The Last Tycoon Grade:
57/B-

Kazan’s final film, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
unfinished novel The Love of the Last
Tycoon, was a for-hire project for the director, but it’s oddly the most
inspired of his final three films. That isn’t to say that The Last Tycoon matches Kazan’s best work- it’s clunky, uneven, and
only partially successful. But the film shows what Kazan was great at better
than most of his late-period work, and for that it deserves a second look.

Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro playing a character loosely
inspired by Irving Thalberg) is a brilliant producer in the middle of the
Golden Age of Hollywood. Monroe is used to teaching screenwriters (Donald
Pleasence) how to do their jobs better, working against his chief rival (Robert
Mitchum) within the studio, building up neurotic actors (Tony Curtis, Jeanne
Moreau), and generally overseeing everything related to production. His rival’s
daughter (Theresa Russell) openly pines for him, but Monroe is haunted by the
death of his actress wife years ago. One day, Monroe sees Kathleen (Ingrid
Boulting), the spitting-image of his dead wife, and falls madly in love with
her. As Monroe’s obsession with her deepens, his health declines, he has
difficult relations with a communist union organizer (Jack Nicholson), and he
starts to lose power and control.

The film gets off to a great start with a meticulous
recreation of Old Hollywood that’s so authentic that one could believe that
Kazan got into a time machine and found long lost sets and films. The film’s
early dealings with the ins-and-outs of the business (De Niro demanding
rewrites, watching dailies, and quarreling with other studio heads over
business) are largely terrific, in no small part due to a fantastic, internal
lead performance from De Niro that suggests a semi-reclusive genius who only
knows how to live through work (remember when he was the greatest actor
alive?). Kazan and De Niro sells Monroe’s loneliness and isolation perfectly-
he’s a man in a gigantic house with no one to live for, and his discomfort
whenever Russell flirts with him is clear.

The film starts to wither as soon as the relationship with
the utterly comatose Boulting takes over. Kazan keeps the images lovely and
lyrical, and De Niro suggests a man who’s so preoccupied loving a ghost that he
starts to lose control, but there’s no spark or interest to their love, so it’s
hard to care. It’s an especially frustrating film, considering how much great
stuff is going on in the margins (Donald Pleasence as a drunken screenwriter,
appearances by Dana Andrews and Ray Milland, Mitchum’s philandering studio man,
Russell’s frustration with both Mitchum and De Niro) and how little is going on
in the central story.

Still, the film is worth seeing for a pair of particularly
inspired sequences. In one, De Niro has been dumped by Boulting, who has
married another man. Heartbroken, crying, and drunk, he reluctantly meets with
Nicholson’s communist union man. Kazan puts them in gorgeous spaces but
accentuates their distance and the pauses between their responses to one
another- it’s no secret that Nicholson detests De Niro, and the sad drunk can’t
help but pick at him. For most of the film, De Niro has been powerful,
uncompromising, and perfectly willing to fire writers and directors if they don’t
fall in line with his vision. Here, he’s just a shambling mess who can’t match
Nicholson’s wits or, when he challenges the already irritated man to a fight,
physical power. Nicholson’s quip that he “always wanted to hit 10 million
dollars” is a particularly nice indication of how the men in power start to
lose ground to unions. Kazan no doubt believes that this is right, but he can’t
help but feel empathy for Monroe’s fall from grace.

That’s even clearer in the final sequence, which echoes an
earlier speech Monroe gives a flustered screenwriter about “making pictures”.
In the earlier scene, De Niro illustrated the magic of movies by writing a
scene in his head involving a voyeuristic scene watching a girl. The roving
camera follows De Niro around until he trails off. Screenwriter Donald
Pleasence asks him what happens? “I don’t know, I was just making pictures”.
Contrast that to its bookend, where a lonely and powerless De Niro repeats the
speech while we finally see the scene in his head: Boulting going off with his
rival, Mitchum, who has taken the studio away from him. He’s a man without
anything, not even the ability to “make pictures” the way he’s always loved to
do. As he walks off into an empty studio lot, saying “I don’t want to lose you”
in a way that could easily apply to his lost love for a woman or for the
movies, Kazan’s final film ends. It’s perhaps not the swan song some might call
for, but it’s a lyrical image to end on nonetheless- the old guard can’t stick
around forever, but their memory remains.

And with that, Kazan’s film career was finished. He wrote
constantly for the next twenty-five years, published novels and his acclaimed
autobiography A Life, received an
Honorary Oscar presented by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro in 1999 (though
a number of actors, notably Ed Harris and Nick Nolte, refused to applaud the
HUAC witness), and gave a number of interviews about his work until his death
in 2003. Many people will never forgive him for his unfortunate participation
in one of Hollywood’s darkest moments. But I can’t help but look at that body
of work and say that they’d be ignoring a masterful artist.

1.On the Waterfront (98/A)

2.A Streetcar Named Desire (97/A)

4.East of Eden (96/A)
. . A Face in the Crowd (95/A)

5.Baby Doll (93/A)

6.Panic in the Streets (91/A)

7.A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (90/A-)

8.Wild River (86/A-)

9.Splendor in the Grass (85/A-)

10.Viva
Zapata! (83/A-)

11.America
America (74/B+)

12.Man
on a Tightrope (67/B)

13.Boomerang!
(64/B)

14.The
Last Tycoon (57/B-)

15.Gentleman’s
Agreement (44/C)

16.Pinky
(40/C)

17.The
Visitors (32/C-)

18.The
Sea of Grass (17/D)

19.The
Arrangement (7/D-)

Best Actor: Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront)

Runner-up: Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Best non-Brando Lead Actor: James Dean (East of Eden)

Runner-up: Andy Griffith (A Face in the Crowd)

Best Actress: Vivien Leigh (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Runner-up: Patricia Neal (A Face in the Crowd)

Best Supporting Actor: Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront)

Runner-up: Karl Malden (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Best Supporting Actress: Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront)

Runner-up: Kim Hunter (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Best Screenplay: Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront)

Runner-up: Budd Schulberg (A Face in the Crowd)

Best Director: On the Waterfront

Runner-up: East of Eden

Best Scene: I Coulda Been a Contender (On the Waterfront)

Runner-up: Hey, Stella! (A Streetcar Named Desire)

The next Director
Spotlight might take some time to get started, but that’s OK. I don’t think
any of you want me to botch Orson Welles.